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INTRODUCTION
As a poet and as a writer of prose tales Edgar Allan Poe has a secure position in literature. ‘Though there are objectors and detractors, on the whole this position is recognized by critics, American and foreign; and by the great body of readers too — as frequent new editions of the poems and tales show. As a critic Poe has not found equal recognition. The critical writings which form the third and by far the largest division of his work are little read and seldom reprinted. They are perhaps generally thought of as hack articles which furnished a means of livelihood to Poe the poet; which may have had readers and influence in their time; — but which are now out of date and negligible even by admirers of Poe's poetry and fiction. The critical writings, however, like everything else connected with Poe's life and work, have been the subject of wide differences of opinion. According to Stedman, for example, the Rationale of Verse is “a curious discussion of mechanics now well enough understood,” and “reads as if addressed to a metrical kindergarten”;(1) according to Professor Saintsbury it is “one of the best things ever written on English prosody and quite astonishingly original.”(2) In the opinion of Mr. Henry James [[,]] Poe's critical work is “probably the most complete and exquisite specimen of provincialism [page x:] ever prepared for the edification of men”(1) ; in the opinion of J. M. Robertson it ‘will better stand critical examination to-day than any similar work produced in America or England in his time.”(2) What, then, is the value of Poe's criticism? In the face of opposing views the reader must answer the question for himself. The material in controversy — at least the best and most characteristic parts of it — is presented in the present volume. The following introduction attempts, by discussing Poe's qualifications as a critic and by summarizing his critical theory, to facilitate an answer.
The value of Poe's critical work, whatever it may be, lies in three possible directions. In the first place “as a part of our literary history, it has,” Stedman allows, “a very decided value.” Poe lived in the first original period of American literature; as a professional critic he reviewed as they came out the works of Bryant, Longfellow, and Hawthorne. His opinion of these writers and even of their less-remembered contemporaries has at least historical interest. Comment on The Minister's Black Veil by the author of William Wilson is worth having. Again, Poe's expressions on poetry and prose fiction may have absolute as well as historical value. Poe may have made a permanent contribution, not only to the body of poetry, but to the body of poetical theory. A poet's slowly elaborated definition of poetry should not be dismissed lightly. Finally Poe's essays on poetry and fiction may have a relative value in connection with his own original work. One of the foremost authorities on [page xi:] Poe, it is true, considers Poe's essays on poetry empty and second-hand, and without important bearing on his own poetry. If, however, Poe developed his poetical theory carefully and independently, and if, as Mr. Andrew Lang believes,(1) Poe, unlike most poet-critics, was true to his theory — then his poetical theory becomes the best commentary on his poetical product. And the same is true of his theory of the prose tale. Before discussing these theories, however, let us try to ascertain Poe's qualifications as a critic.
I
Where are we to look, Wordsworth asks,(2) “for that union of qualifications which must necessarily exist before the decisions of a critic can be of absolute value? — for a mind at once poetical and philosophical?” “Among those, and those only,” he replies, “who, never having suffered their youthful love of poetry to remit much of its force, have applied to the consideration of the laws of this art the best power of their understanding.” Poe — along it is true with various other qualities untoward — possessed this union of qualifications. He never lost his youthful love of poetry; and he applied to the consideration of the laws of poetry the best power of his understanding. He had in kind, if not in degree, the same [page xii:] qualities in combination which made great critics of Dryden and Coleridge; he had “a mind at once poetical and philosophical.”
Poe was a poet not merely in the sense that he left poetry of enduring value — as we have taken for granted — but also in the sense that poetry was, if not the sole, at least the highest and most lasting interest of his life. Unlike other American writers of his time, he was a man of letters and nothing else. He made his living by literature and devoted his entire energy to it from first to last. And he devoted himself most unreservedly to what he considered highest in literature — that is, to poetry. Though the “events not to be controlled” which played so large a part in his life prevented him from accomplishing what he wished in ‘the field of his choice,” he could say in the Preface of 1845: “With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion.”(1) Poe himself believed the poetic gift essential to the critic. The poet is not necessarily a critic; but the critic must be a poet. “Poets,” he says, “are by no means necessarily judges of poetry, but nothing is more certain than that, to be a judge of poetry, it is necessary at least to have the poetic sentiment, if not the poetic power — the ‘vision’ if not the ‘faculty divine.’”(2)
Combined with and dominating Poe's poetic sentiment was his logical or “ratiocinative” faculty. It is not, according [page xiii:] to Poe himself, remarkable to find these two powers in combination; indeed ‘the truly imaginative mind,” he says, “is never otherwise than analytic.”(1) Poe was conscious of possessing this logical faculty; he cultivated it and gloried in it. It was perhaps his most characteristic mental feature. The analytical powers, — he says in a passage in which, as is often the case when he is discussing character even in fiction, he has more than half in mind his own character — the analytical powers “are always to their possessor, when inord1nately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment. As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles.”(2) This faculty Poe applied to every subject which he treated. In every subject he sought the philosophy or rationale.(3) “It is the curse of a certain order of mind;” says Poe, thinking again of his own mind, “that it can never rest satisfied with the consciousness of its ability to do a thing. Still less is it content with doing it. It must both know and show how it is done.”(4) ‘Thus Poe, being a poet, [page xiv:] inevitably theorized, or criticised, poetry. Indeed to Poe poetry itself was largely a matter of logic.(1) It was the result of a reconciliation of “genius with artistic skill.”(2) The most profound art is “based both in instinct and analysis.”(3) He would have admitted perhaps that certain effects in poetry and music are “simply out of the reach of analysis.”(4) But in a large sense analysis is the highest activity of the mind, and criticism is above poetry itself. Or criticism includes poetry, as the greater the less. “Theory and practice are in so much one, that the former implies or includes the latter. If the practice fail it is because the theory is imperfect.” “To say that a critic could not have written the work which he criticises [[criticizes]], is to put forth a contradiction in terms.”(5) What we call poetic “creation” is only poetic practice which should be directed and dominated by the higher theory. Thus Poe was not only a poet, but by the law of his nature a critic of poetry. And there was, in his mind, not the slightest hostility between the creative and the critical [page xv:] faculties; “it is nonsense to assert that the highest genius would not be benefited by attention to its modes of manifestation.”(1)
The same logical analysis which Poe applied to his own work he employed when he was called upon to criticise [[criticize]] the work of others. To him criticism was a science. “Shall we so term it?” he asks in Graham's Magazine as early as 1842.(2) He objects to the puffery, vague opinion, and generalization, which formed the staple of the reviews of his day. He believes the criticism of a book to be the “passing of judgment upon its merits or defects.”(3) And this judgment must be reasoned. The opinion of Southey, for example, is worth “only just so much as it demonstrates.”(4) Wilson again lacks the first requisite for the critic, — viz., principles, analysis, and demonstration.(5) Poe himself endeavors to be “ the just critic who reasons his way.” He defends himself, in the “Reply to Outis,” against the charge of having descended to personal abuse or to “ mangling by wholesale.” “No man,” he boasts, “can point to a single critique, among the very numerous ones which I have written during the last ten years, which is either wholly fault-finding or wholly in approbation; nor is there an instance to be discovered, among all that I have published, of my having set forth, either in praise or censure, a single opinion upon any critical topic of moment, without attempting, at least, to give it authority by something that wore the [page xvi:] semblance of a reason. Now is there a writer in the land,” he asks, “who, having dealt in criticism even one-fourth as much as myself, can of his own criticisms conscientiously say the same?”(1) ‘The boast is not an empty one. Allowance must always be made in Poe's reviews (as will appear later) for various kinds of unreasonableness — not so much for deliberate injustice, as for ignorance, and crotchet, and prejudice. One, however, who has read through Poe's critical writings, which extend from 1831 to his death, and which were written in different places and for many different periodicals — which were produced, that is, during a long period and under circumstances very unfavorable to uniformity of judgment — a reader of this mass of material is struck by the remarkable consistency which runs through the whole work.(2) This consistency can only be due to the fact that Poe clearly formulated critical principles and applied them to his varying subjects with precision.
Poe, then, had a rare combination of qualities for criticism: he was a poet and an analyst. And just as his typical tales, for example The Pit and the Pendulum and Ligeia, are the result of unusual emotional and imaginative states of mind, first experienced and subsequently analyzed and rationalized; so his criticism has interest and value, because it is the work of an imaginative and poetical mind gifted with the strange power of, so to speak, looking coolly on and subjecting its products and processes to logical analysis. [page xvii:]
II
If, to the great natural gifts just mentioned, had been added others of perhaps a lower order — judgment, deliberation, fairness, knowledge — and if, further, circumstances in general had been more favorable, Poe might have become a critic of the first rank. As it was, weaknesses of character and equipment, “ events not to be controlled” in his own life, and limitations belonging to the period in which his life was spent, prevented this highest development.
In the first place overweening confidence in his own intellect, in his ability to master everything from a cryptogram to the cosmogony by sheer reasoning power, led Poe to overestimate and abuse a valuable faculty. His intellect was too often untempered by taste,, common sense, and human feeling. He often seems blindly and willfully bent on carrying out preconceived theories to conclusions which he himself must have felt to be false. This was a source of critical error. For example, originality was in Poe's theory an indispensable mark of poetic genius. The originality of The Sinless Child by Elizabeth Oakes Smith “must forever entitle it,” in Poe's judgment, “to the admiration and respect of every competent critic.” Longfellow's Rain in Summer is “plagiarized” from this admirable poetess.(1) Poe's frequent charges of plagiarism, by the way, were due, not so much to jealousy, or, as Briggs thought,(2) to mere monomania, as to the fact that by a process of reasoning he reached the conclusion [page xviii:] that originality was the first requisite of poetry and then resolutely tested each new poem for this quality. ‘There is something wrong in à priori reasoning which attributes this mark of genius to Mrs. Smith and denies it to Longfellow.
Again Poe never had quite time to do competent criticism. He took his reviewing seriously, it is true: he was conscientious and painstaking. He objects to the practice of English reviewers who, neglecting to read the book under review, make it the occasion for an original disquisition on the same subject; this is not criticism.(1) He objects to the vagueness and generality of contemporary reviewers,(2) and fills — even overburdens — his own reviews with specific analysis and quotation — in fact this is one of the ear-marks of his work, and leaves no room for doubt as to his having read the book under discussion. “We are patient, and have gone through the whole book with the most dogged determination,”(3) he says of some third-rate novel; and in this and other cases he shows his honesty by giving a careful summary of the plot. At the same time all Poe's criticism was piecework and hackwork — written to order, often hurriedly, on all sorts of books, as the exigencies of his profession demanded. At the close of the excellent article on Barnaby Rudge he fears he has written without due deliberation; ‘for, alas! the hurried duties of the journalist preclude it.”(4) For the Broadway Journal he had sometimes [page xix:] to supply the entire copy for an issue, and this ‘when his physique was rapidly running down.”(1) First-rate criticism is not written under such conditions. Poe “dealt for the most part with small subjects,” as Stedman sums up the matter by saying, ‘and when he had a large one, he seldom had leisure for treating it in a large and adequate way.”(2) The circumstances under which Poe's critical work was produced, as has already been noted, make more remarkable the consistency and unity of principle which run through the whole. They also, however, explain why the best of Poe's criticism is to be found, not in any extended treatise, but in his “suggestions” and “marginalia,” and in the brief but brilliant passages which he himself so often extracted for republication from their context of ephemeral commonplace.
Poe's judgment, which in its healthy and best state was fair and independent, was sometimes warped by personal feeling and prejudice. His independence, considering the state of literature and criticism in America in his time, was indeed remarkable. He attempted deliberately to get rid of the prepossessions which ordinarily hinder absolute judgment; he even went too far in freeing himself from the bonds of time and place and received opinion — so that his judgments are often novel and merely individual — too entirely his own. For one thing he tried to rise above national prejudice — and this at a time when America was just beginning to emerge from a state of provincialism into nationality in letters, and when it was particularly hard to avoid undue respect [page xx:] for British productions on the one hand or undue pride in American productions on the other. He believed that ‘the world at large is the only proper stage for the literary histrio”;(1) and that the point of view of the critic must be above national lines. “There is not a more disgusting spectacle under the sun than our subserviency to British criticism. It is disgusting, first, because it is truckling, servile, pusillanimous, — secondly, because of its gross irrationality.”(2) But it is only ‘ the excess of our subserviency” which is blamable. “In paying, asa nation, a respectful and not undue deference to a supremacy [the literary supremacy of Europe] rarely questioned but by prejudice or ignorance, we should, of course, be doing nothing more than acting in a rational manner.” On the other hand he protests against literary chauvinism. “We throw off, with the most presumptuous and unmeaning hauteur, all deference whatever to foreign opinion, ... we pet up a hue and cry about the necessity of encouraging native writers of merit ... and thus often find ourselves involved in the gross paradox of liking a stupid book the better, because, sure enough, its stupidity is American.”(3)
The correctness of Poe's attitude in this matter — one of great difficulty at the time, and likewise of great importance in its relation to the development of American literature — should be borne in mind in consideration of Mr. Henry James's dictum (already quoted(4) ) upon the provincialism of Poe's critical writings. They were in [page xxi:] many respects provincial, — as was everything else in America in their time: they even bore one of the special marks of provincialism in their frequent combination of ignorance with self-sufficiency.(1) Poe, like some later Americans, could not raise himself into cosmopolitanism by his boot-straps. But on the whole he, better than most of his contemporaries, knew where he stood.
To return to the subject of independence, Poe was perhaps less open to national than to sectional bias. But his Southern feeling was never aggressive. In regretting that Simms and Pinkney had been “born too far south,” and in ridiculing the “magnanimous cabal” of the North American Review, he was not so much unfair himself as ready to resent what he believed to be unfairness on the New England side.
He professed, further, to rise above received opinion in criticism; he had no respect for either traditional or popular reputation. He is fond of quoting the aphorism of Chamfort: Il y à parier que toute idée publique, toute convention reçue, est une sottise car elle a convenu au plus grand nombre. Hence he is not afraid to say that “there is about the Antigone, as well as about all the ancient plays, an insufferable baldness, or platitude, the inevitable result of inexperience in art”;(2) that Paradise Lost has “eminent, although overestimated merits”;(3) that [page xxii:] Carlyle is an ass;(1) — or to make other possible mistakes from which ordinary men are saved by timidity. Poe's errors, which are usually explicable and easily allowed for, show his strength as a critic. He was able, moreover, as many instances show, to recognize genius before it had received popular approval.
To illustrate Poe's independence, and his general critical attitude, we may take some examples from the Southern Literary Messenger during his first year as a reviewer. He begins in May, 1835, with Horseshoe Robinson, by his patron J. P. Kennedy, which he praises justly but not unreservedly. He has an interesting review of an American translation of I Promesst Sposi, which he does not “scruple to give great praise.” He makes his reputation as a critic by a review — worth reading as an example of his “tomahawk style” — of Norman Leslie, by Theodore S. Fay, an American “genius” and associate editor of the New York Mirror. He shows this “bepuffed, beplastered, and be-Mirrored” popular favorite to be merely silly. He has four pages on a reprint of Robinson Crusoe which cannot be improved. He reviews the poems of Joseph Rodman Drake, just posthumously published, — which have been hailed as the work of an “American Keats.” After some just observations on provincialism, he shows the Culprit Fay to be destitute of true poetic quality, having first as a preliminary to this and later estimates of verse, established critical standards by attempting a definition of poetry. There could not be a better example of sanity [page xxiii:] and sound critical method. In June, 1836, he gives high praise to a new English writer in a review of the first American reprint of Sketches by Boz, beginning a series of appreciative articles on Dickens which culminate in the famous paper on Barnaby Rudge. In the same month he writes on the Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge; “with us the most trivial memorial of Coleridge is a treasure of inestimable price.”(1) And so on; these. are fair examples; and Poe is equally sane throughout, whether the subject be old or new.
Judged by the enlightened opinion of the present day Poe is occasionally wrong. Sometimes, as in the case of Paradise Lost, the error, if error it be, is an honest one, due to a mistake in theory. Sometimes unfortunately it is due to unfairness and prejudice. He “cannot point an arrow at any woman,” and in particular when they are his friends he is too kind in his notices of the “female poets.” Though he calls Cranch “one of our finest poets”(2) he is generally bitter against the transcendentalists, and his tone indicates pique and jealousy. In a scathing review of the poems of Rufus Dawes, of October, 1842, he is supposed to have taken vengeance on Dawes for an unfavorable critique of Al Aaraaf printed thirteen years before;(3) and in an equally severe review of W. W. Lord's Poems in 1845 he is supposed to have been equally spiteful. In both reviews he is right in his judgment: in both he includes some praise; in both he [page xxiv:] disclaims personal ill will. But the tone is bad — inexcusably coarse and abusive — and here, as too often elsewhere, Poe is no longer the just judge. The best that can be said in the matter is that he sometimes does not rise above the low standards of his time.
In determining Poe's qualifications as a critic we must finally inquire as to his education, reading, and general training for the office. What was his equipment? On this point there has been the usual difference of opinion. The facts are about as follows. Poe spent five years at school in England, and six years in the English and Classical School at Richmond. In both schools he apparently had good teachers, and in the latter he was noted as one of the two best Latinists.(1) He was at the University of Virginia for nearly a year, during which time he used to visit the library, “in search of old French books, principally histories.” He was praised for a translation in verse from Tasso, and in the final examinations “excelled” in the ancient languages and in French.(2) He was for nearly a year at West Point where he stood third in French and seventeenth in mathematics in a class of eighty-seven. During this time he seems to have read the poets. He had on his table a volume of Campbell's Poems and characteristically found therein traces of plagiarism.(3) Indeed as he was always fond of poetry, and as he had already published two volumes of [page xxv:] poetry and was about to publish another, we are not surprised to hear from one of his contemporaries at West Point that “ his acquaintance with English literature was extensive and accurate and his verbal memory wonderful. He could repeat both prose and poetry by the hour.” The following from the same authority is interesting: ‘”The whole bent of his mind at that time seemed to be toward criticism — or, more properly speaking, caviling. Whether it were Shakespeare or Byron, Addison or Johnson — the acknowledged classic or the latest poetaster — all came in alike for his critical censure. He seemed to take especial delight in caviling at passages that had received the most unequivocal stamp of general approval.”(1) Poe's academic education, then, was fairly good but incomplete. In school and college, as later, he was not scholarly, but intelligent; he had a fondness for literature and a bent toward criticism.
Even in school and college, however, Poe probably got less from regular instruction than from pursuing his own intellectual interests. On the whole he was self-taught; and on this account and because of lack of Opportunity never quite liberally educated. He had intellectual curiosity, with a judgment and taste of his own, and his reading, as far as it went, was genuine and assimilative. But he never had time or opportunity to come broadly in contact with the best, in men or books, and was thrown too much on his own resources. Except for Lowell, “he never met his intellectual equal in the [page xxvi:] flesh,”(1) being in this respect at a great disadvantage compared with his New England contemporaries, who formed a mutually helpful group, and had in general greater opportunities both at home and abroad. This intellectual loneliness led to egotism and narrowness. Moreover he did not have taste or opportunity for systematic study. His reading was desultory. He had no library of his own, and his reading was mainly in recent or current literature, - — in periodicals and chance books. During the last part of his life he doubtless read little but the magazines of his “competitors” and such books as came to him for review. Poe's mind, then, was not stored with the best that has been known and thought in the world. He lacked the breadth and sanity and flexibility which come from sufficient learning. The best fruits of criticism are traditional and it would be idle to expect them from a self-taught reviewer writing in this new country in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.
Two things may be said, however, in this connection. One is that, with this deficiency of preparation and this disadvantage of time and place, Poe could meet the best minds of other countries and other ages (in their works) without any appearance of inferiority; whoever the writer in question he always speaks in his criticism as an equal of an equal. And secondly, it is possible that if Poe had had the industry to become a scholar he might have lacked or lost something of the originality and independence which are the merit of his criticism.(2) The many [page xxvii:] qualities which go to make up the perfect critic are never found combined. Poe was a light-armed combatant in the field of criticism, and had the advantages and disadvantages belonging to that kind.
III
Concerning Poe's actual acquaintance with literature there is some evidence worth collecting. He studied Greek in school, but made little use of it in his maturity and probably read the Greek writers only in translation. He attributes the Œdipus at Colonos to Æschylus.(1) He was in youth, as we have seen, a good Latinist, and had some first-hand knowledge of Latin literature. He quotes, sometimes from the minor Latin writers.(2) It is doubtful, however, if he read much Latin, or if the Latin writers formed any essential part of his literary fund. He is said to have known no German.(3) His knowledge [page xxviii:] of Italian and Spanish was slight. French, however, he read easily, and his wide, though unsystematic, reading in French literature undoubtedly had its influence on his critical ideas. Poe's mind, moreover, was quick and intuitive, and from reading in and about literatures in foreign tongues he was able to approach the universality of view which is impossible for the man of one language.(1)
In English literature Poe read widely: his fruitful reading, however, was mainly in the nineteenth century. Of Shakespeare, Milton, the English Bible, and the older literature in general he spoke disparagingly.”(2) A passage summarizing his opinion of the poets of the sixteenth and [page xxix:] seventeenth centuries is worth quoting: ‘Their writings sprang immediately from the soul and partook intensely of the nature of that soul. It is not difficult to perceive the tendency of this glorious abandon. To elevate immeasurably all the energies of mind, — but again, so to mingle the greatest possible fire, force, delicacy, and all good things, with the lowest possible bathos, baldness, and utter imbecility, as to render it not a matter of doubt, but of certainty, that the average results of mind in such a school will be found inferior to those results in one (ceteris paribus) more artificial: such, we think, is the view of the older English poetry in which a very calm examination will bear us out.”(1) He admired the metrical skill of Pope but would not have called him a poet.(2) He formed his ideas of poetry on that branch of the romantic poetry of the nineteenth century in which Coleridge was the leader. He read Wordsworth, but not sympathetically.(3) For Coleridge he expressed the greatest admiration, calling Christabel, the Ancient Mariner and Love “the purest of all poems.”(4) For Poe English poetry seems almost to have begun here. Shelley was pure genius and ‘profoundly original.”(5) Keats was “the sole British poet who has never erred in his themes” and “the greatest of the English poets of the same age, if not of any age.”(6) Tennyson developed “the truest and [page xxx:] purest of poetical styles.” Miss Barrett narrowly missed uniting the “Tennysonian poetic sense” with the “Shelleyan abandon.”(1) These poets Poe read and loved; they (with his own work) formed the basis of his critical theory of poetry. ‘The fact that they are all from one age and kind perhaps accounts for the narrowness in Poe's definition of poetry which will appear later.
Let us inquire, finally, as to Poe's study of earlier critics, to whom he may have been indebted for critical ideas. His reading in this direction in general paralleled his reading of the poets, and led him to the same conclusions. He quotes Aristotle, but at second-hand;(2) it is doubtful if he read the Poetics even in translation. He is fond of referring to Bielfeld's Premiers Traits de l’ Érudition Universelle, 1767, an encyclopedic work which summarizes the critical views of the eighteenth century; and he quotes from it, among other things, a definition of poetry, as l’ art d’ exprimer les pensées par la fiction, to support his belief that poetry involves invention or creation.(3) Of more importance was an early perusal of A. W. Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, in Black's translation (1815). Traces of this reading run pretty well through his work.(4) Beside miscellaneous [page xxxi:] ideas and curiosities for Pinakidia,(1) he got from it some knowledge — perhaps most of his knowledge — of Greek and later dramatic literature, which he discusses often and with assurance. He possibly got also from Schlegel's introductory lecture some important notions in regard to poetry. For example, the following (which he read before 1831) may have started him in developing his poetical theory: “It belongs to the general philosophical theory of poetry, and the other fine arts, to establish the fundamental laws of the beautiful. ... For this purpose certain scientific investigations are indispensable to the artist. ... The general theory, on the other hand, seeks to analyze that essential faculty of human nature — the sense of the beautiful. ... Poetry, taken in its widest acceptation, [is] the power of creating what is beautiful, and representing it to the eye or the ear.”(2) From this Poe may have derived his “rhythmical creation of beauty.” He may with Schlegel have found ‘the essence of the northern poetry in melancholy.” He undoubtedly got from Schlegel the principle of “unity (or totality) of interest.”(3) There is little evidence to show that he read other German critics to whom he refers — Winckelmann, Novalis, Schelling, Goethe, Lessing — except some general remarks on German criticism in the Marginalia(4) — in which he prefers “even Voltaire to Goethe,” and holds [page xxxii:] “Macaulay to possess more of the true critical spirit than Augustus William and Frederick Schlegel combined.”’ Poe read to most purpose in the critical writings of the nineteenth century — the best period of English criticism — and, fortunately, he was above all indebted to Coleridge. He read before 1831 Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800), the Preface to the Poems (1815), with its distinction between fancy and imagination, and the Essay Supplementary to the Preface (1815), with its discussion of the relation of poetry and criticism.(1) His expressions on these essays of Wordsworth are mainly in the nature of protest; but he doubtless got from them more than he would admit, and they at least set him thinkings “Sometime” before 1831, also, he read the Biographia Literaria (1817); a little later he read the Table Talk and Letters, Conversations, and Recollections. He speaks of Coleridge, almost without exception, in the tone of highest reverence; “ the most trivial memorial of Coleridge is a treasure of inestimable price.”(2) He urges the republication in America of the Biographia, “the most deeply interesting of the prose writings of Coleridge.” To say that Poe derived all his critical ideas from Coleridge is incorrect; it is hardly too much to say that his poetic theory, as expressed throughout his writings from the Letter to B —— to the Poetic Principle, represents the reaction and forming of his own mind after a sympathetic study of Coleridge's work. He derived from Coleridge, for example, the distinction between fancy and imagination; he attempted to analyze and [page xxxiii:] clarify it, and used it as a basis for his estimates of Drake and Moore. He believed with Coleridge that “imagination is the soul of poetic genius”; that imagination in man is “a lesser degree of the creative power of God”; or, in the words of Coleridge, “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am.”(1) He doubtless found in Coleridge, as in Schlegel, authority for his principle of unity, — as for example in Coleridge's “tone and spirit of unity,” — “reducing multitude into unity of effect.”(2) From Coleridge's rather enigmatical dictum to the effect that “a poem of any length neither can be, or ought to be, all poetry “ he perhaps got his idea that the epic is at best a “series of minor poems,” — and that a long poem is really a contradiction in terms.(3) He took Coleridge's definition of a poem, with its distinction between poetry and science, and following a suggestion in the context, undertook to improve on Coleridge, by distinguishing poetry from romance and by clearing up the relation between poetry and metrical form. To show one of Poe's most obvious borrowings, and to show also how he added his own thought to what he borrowed, the two definitions may be placed side by side:
“A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is [page xxxiv:] compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.” (Biographia, chap. xiv.)
“A poem, in my opinion, [as opposed to Coleridge's?] is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by having for its object an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure, being a poem only so far as this object is attained; romance presenting perceptible images with definite, poetry with indefinite sensations, to which end music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness.” (Letter to B —— .)
Poe got ideas also from an appreciative reading of Hazlitt, whom he characterizes, in a review of the Characters of Shakespeare, as “emphatically a critic, brilliant, epigrammatic, startling, paradoxical, and suggestive, rather than accurate, luminous, or profound.”(1) The Lectures on the English Poets he probably read very early; and in a review of Hazlitt's Literary Remains, in 1836, he quotes “a fine passage on the ideal,” which suited his own conceptions.(2) He speaks of Leigh Hunt's essay on poetry (prefixed to Imagination and Fancy, 1844) with contempt — perhaps because it ran counter to some of his favorite ideas.(3) He had high regard for Macaulay, and doubtless learned from the Essay on [page xxxv:] Montgomery some of the tricks of the reviewer's trade. An admirable critique of the Essays, however, — in which he calls Macaulay a “terse, forcible, and logical writer ... not a comprehensive or profound thinker” — shows that he did not wrongly estimate Macaulay's abilities.
Poe, then, had read some of the best English critics, and was not entirely unequipped for criticism. He learned from the best masters — Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt. It is not wrong to say, with Professor Woodberry, that Coleridge was, “ taken all in all, the guiding genius of Poe's entire intellectual life,”(1) — it being added that Coleridge stands in a similar relation to many of the other poets and critics of the nineteenth century. Much in Poe's poetry goes back to the same original mind. But just as Poe's poetry, while owing much to Coleridge and other predecessors, is still profoundly original, — so Poe's criticism, though founded on the work of Coleridge and earlier critics, develops into something entirely his own.
IV
Poe's critical papers are of two kinds — general essays in poetic theory and specific reviews. The latter, dealing sometimes with valuable, more often with valueless and forgotten books, have various degrees of interest. They are all, however, merely the application to particular cases of general principles which run, as has been said, through the entire work. The main interest, then, is in [page xxxvi:] the general essays or in such portions of the others as develop definitions and standards; at any rate one who understands Poe's theories needs no further introduction to their particular applications.
Let us take first the theory of poetry. The narrowness of Poe's conception of poetry has frequently been commented upon. It includes only one kind of poetry, being based upon his own poetical work, or upon work very similar thereto. ‘This does not, however, mean that Poe's taste was narrow; or that he saw no merit in such works, outside his definition, as are usually included under the head of poetry. He does not “ gain say the peculiar merits” of the Essay on Man or Hudibras.(1) He would only say that these works are philosophy or satire in verse, and not poetry. So a drama in verse is not poetry (though it may contain poetry) — because it is a drama, and is distinguished by difference of aim.(2) To include all these different things under one term only leads to confusion and obscurity. Poe would in general restrict the word to what is known as “pure poetry.” It is well, then, to begin an exposition of Poe's theory with negatives. In the first place the aim of poetry is not to convey truth or to teach a moral lesson. To believe the contrary is the ‘heresy of the didactic,” against which Poe never tires of declaiming.(3) Truth is prosaic and its proper medium is prose. It may, indeed, be introduced into a poem but always as subsidiary — as humbly ministering [page xxxvii:] to the poetic purpose. “If, through the attainment of a truth, we are led to perceive a harmony where none was apparent before, we experience, at once, the true poetical effect — but this effect is referable to the harmony alone, and not in the least degree to the truth which merely served to render the harmony manifest.”(1) It is possible, of course, “to introduce didacticism, with effect, into a poem,” as it is, “to introduce “poetical images and measures, with effect, into a didactic essay.” Only, however, by a tour de force; thus to attempt ‘to commingle the obstinate oils and waters of poetry and truth” is ‘to labor at a disadvantage “ and ‘to be guilty of a fruitless and wasteful expenditure of energy.”(2) The trouble with Longfellow, for example, was that he diluted his pure poetry with didacticism. In the same way the aim of poetry is not to convey passion. ‘” Poetry and passion are discordant.”(3) “True passion is prosaic — homely.” It is only in the subsidence and control of passion that “ we are poetic, and it is clear that a poem now written will be poetic in the exact ratio of its dispassion. A passionate poem is a contradiction in terms.”(4) “We are willing to permit Tennyson to bring, to the intense passion which prompts his Locksley Hall, the aid of that terseness and pungency which are derivable from rhythm and from rhyme. The effect he produces, however, is a purely passionate, [page xxxviii:] and not, unless in detached passages of this magnificent philippic, a properly poetic effect.”(1) Again humorous verse is not poetry. “Humor ... is directly antagonistical to that which is the soul of the muse proper. ... The only bond between humorous verse and poetry, properly so called, is that they employ in common a certain tool [rhythm and rhyme]. But this single circumstance has been sufficient to occasion, and to maintain through long ages, a confusion of two very distinct ideas in the brain of the unthinking critic.”(2)
If, then, poetry is not concerned with truth or passion or humor, what is its province? Poe's answer is in outline as follows. The world of mind may be divided into the pure intellect; taste; and the moral sense, “Just as the intellect concerns itself with truth, so taste informs us of the beautiful, while the moral sense is regardful of duty.” Taste is the arbiter of poetry; and the province of poetry is beauty. ‘The sense of beauty is an immortal instinct, planted deep in the nature of man. This sense finds delight in the manifold forms of nature amid which man exists, and it finds delight, likewise, in a description of these forms. Mere description of actual beauty, however, is not poetry.(3) The immortal mind of man longs for a beauty above and beyond nature, — a beauty not of this world; it strives to anticipate some [page xxxix:] portion of the loveliness which belongs to eternity. It is this “struggle to apprehend the supernal loveliness” which gives rise to poetry. It is this higher and more fleeting beauty which the poet tries to catch and reveal in words, — working to this end through an “elevating excitement of the soul.” Music, “in its various modes of meter, rhythm, and rhyme,” if not absolutely essential to poetry, is nevertheless so vitally important that no poet would decline its assistance. Indeed “it is in music, perhaps, that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the poetic sentiment, it struggles — the creation of supernal beauty.” In pure music man perhaps in fact anticipates (Poe thought) the music of heaven. At any rate the highest effects open to the poet are secured by the union of music with poetry. The poetry of words, then, may be defined, in brief, as the “Rhythmical Creation of Beauty.” The poet whose work best answers this definition is Keats. “He is the sole English poet who has never erred in his themes. Beauty is always his aim.”(1)
What Poe means by the beautiful, as the subject of poetry, is further explained by the fact that he expressly includes under this term,(2) or ordinarily couples with it,(3) the sublime and the mystical. What he means by the sublime he does not explain. The mystical he applies to “that class of composition in which there lies beneath the transparent upper current of meaning an under or suggestive one. What we vaguely term the moral of any [page xl:] sentiment is its mystic or secondary expression. It has the vast force of an accompaniment in music. ‘This vivifies the air; that spiritualizes the fanciful conception, and lifts it into the ideal.” Comus, the Ancient Mariner, the Sensitive Plant of Shelley — to take some of Poe's examples — have this suggestive character. ‘In every glimpse of beauty presented [by these poems], we catch, through long and wild vistas, dim bewildering visions of a far more ethereal beauty beyond.”(1) Poe's own poems, for example The Haunted Palace, perhaps best illustrate his meaning.
Imagination is the soul of poetry;(2) and imagination, like poetry, partakes of the divine. “Imagination in man is, possibly, a lesser degree of the creative power of God.” Poetry does not lie in mere reproduction of nature; it demands creation; “the word ποίησις itself speaks volumes upon this point.”(3) The poetic beauty is an ideal beauty.
The word poetry has two meanings, which in Poe's theory are carefully distinguished. It means, first, “the poetic sentiment” in the abstract, — that elevating excitement of the soul which comes from contemplation of the highest beauty. It means, secondly, — in its ordinary acceptation — the expression of poetic sentiment in language. Poetry in this ordinary sense is the result of the poetic sentiment in the mind of the poet, and its merit is measured by “its capabilities of exciting the poetic sentiments [page xli:] in others.”(1) The poetic sentiment is a divine gift; to this the poeta nascitur applies. Poetry in the concrete, however — the poetic effect — is a matter not merely of inspiration, but of reason and calculation as well. ‘A poem is not the poetic faculty, but the means ) of exciting it in mankind;’”’ and this means is subject to analysis. Hence in the composition of a poem logical acumen is even more important than “the faculty of Ideality”; and Coleridge, who wrote “the purest of all poems,” possibly owed his “almost magical pre-eminence rather to metaphysical than poetical powers.” Here possibly Poe is led into exaggeration; but he everywhere insists that the highest poetry cannot come from mere inspiration, — that it demands also the coolest calculation. “How few,” he says, “are willing to admit the possibility of reconciling genius with artistic skill! Yet this reconciliation is not only possible, but absolutely necessary. It is a mere prejudice which has hitherto prevented the union, by studiously insisting upon a natural repulsion which not only does not exist, but which is at war with all the analogies of nature. ‘The greatest poems will not be written until this prejudice is annihilated.”(2) Genius furnishes the material, which ‘in the hands of the true artist ... is but a mass of clay, of which anything may be fashioned at will, or according to the skill of the workman.”(3)
What, then, to the true artist is meant by the mental process which we call imagination? — for even this process, [page xlii:] according to Poe, is not beyond analysis. Imagination is creation; and this in turn is equivalent to invention, or novelty, or originality.(1) The equivalency of these five terms gives the clue to an important, and perhaps neglected, part of Poe's theory. The imagination creates. It cannot, however, produce anything entirely novel, — anything which did not before exist; ‘if it could it would create not only ideally, but substantially, — as do the thoughts of God.”(2) The new is always resoluble into the old; the novelty is one of combination, ‘To create, then, is only to produce novel combinations.(3) The same terms may be applied to invention or originality. “True invention is elaborate. ‘There is no greater mistake than the supposition that a true originality is a mere matter of impulse or inspiration. To originate is carefully, patiently, and understandingly to combine.”(4) The possibilities of invention, of originality, are moreover unlimited. ‘The true invention never exhausts itself. It is mere cant and ignorance to talk of the really imaginative man's ‘writing himself out.’ As well prate about the aridity of the eternal ocean εξ ουπερ πάντες ποταηοί. So long as the universe of thought shall furnish matter for [page xliii:] novel combination, so long will the spirit of true genius be original, be exhaustless — be itself.”(1)
Poe's theory is most succinctly stated in the following passage, — which will serve as summary. ‘The first element [of poetry] is the thirst for supernal Beauty — a beauty which is not afforded the soul by any existing collocation of earth's forms — a beauty which, perhaps, no possible combination of these forms would fully produce. Its second element is the attempt to satisfy this thirst by novel combinations among those forms of beauty which already exist — or by novel combinations of those combinations which our predecessors, toiling in chase of the same phantom, have already set in order. We thus clearly deduce the novelty, the originality, the invention, the imagination, or lastly the creation of BEAUTY, (for the terms as here employed are synonymous) as the essence of all Poesy.”(2)
The principle of originality is so important in Poe's criticism that it deserves some further explanation and illustration. The grossest offense under this head is plagiarism. Poe is constantly detecting plagiarism : it is, however, in his eyes less a moral than a literary sin. “The great adversary of invention is imitation.”(3) To imitativeness is due the stagnation of the drama. ‘To revive the drama “the first thing necessary is to burn or bury the ‘old models,’ and to forget, as quickly as possible, that ever a play has been penned. The second thing is to consider de novo what are the capabilities of the drama — not merely what hitherto have been its conventional purposes. [page xliv:] The third and last point has reference to the composition of a play (showing to the fullest extent these capabilities), conceived and constructed with feeling and with taste, but with feeling and taste guided and controlled in every particular by the details of reason — of common sense — in a word, of a natural art.”(1) Longfellow errs, not merely in his didacticism, but in his imitativeness. Students of Longfellow's poetry, who understand Poe's theory of originality, will also understand Poe's attitude in this much misunderstood matter. He often praises Longfellow, — and with entire consistency, for “ imitators are not, necessarily, unoriginal — except in the exact points of imitation. Mr. Longfellow, decidedly the most -audacious imitator in America, is remarkably original, or, in other words, imaginative, upon the whole.”(2) Some further elaboration of the theory of originality is to be found in the second paper on Hawthorne, where distinction is made between absolute novelty and novelty of effect. The latter, “the true originality — true in respect to its purposes — is that which, in bringing out the half-formed, the reluctant, or the unexpressed fancies of mankind, or in exciting the more delicate pulses of the heart's passion, or in giving birth to some universal sentiment or instinct in embryo, thus combines with the pleasurable effect of apparent novelty, a real egoistic delight. The reader, in the case first supposed (that of absolute novelty), is excited, but embarrassed, disturbed, in some degree even pained at his own want of perception, at his own folly in not having himself hit upon the idea. In [page xlv:] the second case his pleasure is doubled. He is filled with an intrinsic and extrinsic delight. He feels and intensely enjoys the seeming novelty of the thought, enjoys it as really novel, as absolutely original with the writer — and himself. They two, he fancies, have, alone of all men, thought thus. They two have, together, created this thing.”(1)
Finally besides originality (in other words invention or imagination) a poem must have artistic form. It must be a unified and organized whole. From his earliest criticism to his latest Poe insists on “the vastly important artistic element,” unity or totality of effect.(2) This explains why, both in theory and in practice, he stands for the short poem. In a poem too long to be read at one sitting totality is lost. A second reason is that in the perusal of a long poem it is impossible to sustain that elevating excitement of the soul which is the essence of poetry; but this second reason is reducible into the first. A poem should be “unique in the proper acceptation of that term.”
We may close the discussion of Poe's theory of poetry by quoting his shortest definition, — which has usually been overlooked. In his sketch entitled Landor's Cottage he speaks of poetry as consisting in “combined novelty and propriety,” — “than in the words just employed,” he says, “I could scarcely give of poetry in the abstract a more rigorous definition.” These words contain, in implication, the larger part of Poe's rationale of poetry. [page xlvi:]
V
Poe's theory of the prose tale may be disposed of more briefly, since it has much in common with his theory of poetry. The poem and the prose tale are governed by the same artistic principles; the two differ in subject matter and form. The poem is the higher mode of expression; it is concerned alone with beauty, and it employs rhythm as an essential aid. The prose tale is less elevated, but broader in its range. Because it discards rhythm it may use material which would be out of place in poetry. “The writer of the prose tale, in short, may bring to his theme a vast variety of modes or inflections of thought and expression — (the ratiocinative, for example, the sarcastic, or the humorous) which are not only antagonistical to the nature of the poem, but absolutely forbidden by one of its must peculiar and indispensable adjuncts; we allude of course to rhythm. It may be added here, par parenthése, that the author who aims at the purely beautiful in a prose tale is laboring at a great disadvantage. For beauty can be better treated in a poem. Not so with terror, or passion, or horror, or a multitude of such other points.”(1)
Allowance being made for this difference in subject matter and mode of expression the principles of composition, already developed for the poem, apply to the prose tale. Here, as ‘in all cases of fictitious composition,” originality “should be the first object.”(2) “Mr. Hawthorne's distinctive trait is invention, creation, imagination, [page xlvii:] originality — a trait which, in the literature of fiction, is positively worth all the rest.”(1) Thus, in fiction as in poetry, originality is equivalent to imagination or creation; and the novelty is again clearly a matter of combination.(2) Dickens's best characters are “creations (that is to say original combinations of character)” and “belong to the most august regions of the ideal.”(3)
“That vital requisite in all works of art, unity,” is of particular importance in fiction, — and unity is a matter of “preconsideration.” Most authors sit down to write without fixed design. “Pen should never touch paper until at least a well-digested general purpose be established. In fiction the dénouement, in all other compositions the intended effect, should be definitely considered and arranged, before writing the first word; and no word should be then written which does not tend, or form a part of a sentence which tends to the development of the dénouement, or to the strengthening of the effect.”(4) Plot in fiction means unity and organization. It is by no means mere complexity of incident, or intrigue. ‘In its most rigorous acceptation, it is that from which no component atom can be removed, and in which none of the component atoms can be displaced, without ruin to the whole; and although a sufficiently good plot may be constructed, without attention to the whole rigor of this definition, still it is the definition which the true artist [page xlviii:] should always keep in view, and always endeavor to consummate in his works.”(1)
Plot, however, — analogous to sculptural outline — can appeal only to the cultivated reader. “At best it is but a secondary and rigidly artistical merit, for which no merit of a higher class — no merit founded in nature — should be sacrificed.”(2) In many of the finest fictions — Gil Blas, Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe — plot is wanting. Defoe, however, like Scott, Godwin, Brockden Brown, used another unifying principle — namely that of “autorial comment.” ‘The writer of fiction may discuss what is transacting, and shape its effect; this “often gives a species of unity (the unity of the writer's individual thought) to the most random narrations.”(3) The binding power of comment should never be neglected.
The highest form of fiction is to be found not in the old-fashioned novel but in the tale, for in this the fullest unity may be realized. The long fiction, like the long poem, loses “the immense force derivable from totality.” It cannot be read at one sitting; the intervention of worldly affairs — even the mere cessation in reading, destroys the unity of effect. ‘In the brief tale, however, the author is enabled to carry out the fullness of his intention, be it what it may. During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer's control.”(4)
Of the principle of unity as it applies to the prose tale [page xlix:] the best statement occurs in the reviews of Hawthorne: “A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique and single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents — he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed; and this is an end unattainable by the novel.”(1)
The method of composition here outlined for the prose tale is strikingly similar to that more fully elaborated for the poem in the Philosophy of Composition; the writer first determines the length of his work and his intended effect; he then proceeds to create or invent — in other words to make such combinations as will establish this effect.
The question then arises whether Poe is here describing the method he actually employed in the composition of his own tales. This question cannot be positively answered: one who has read the tales carefully, however, [page l:] in the light of the paragraph just quoted will hesitate to answer it in the negative. And a similar statement may be made concerning the Philosophy of Composition. This celebrated piece has been regarded as an after-thought, as fiction, as a hoax It certainly is not plain autobiography It is doubtless, like many of Poe's tales, the subsequent analysis of a mental process more or less unconscious and indeliberate. It is doubtless rhetorically dressed and exaggerated for magazine purposes. It is none the less supported by the artificial character of The Raven; and it is consistent with Poe's entire critical theory. It is — if in the absence of proof another opinion may be hazarded — fundamentally true.
The originality of Poe's critical theory, which has already been insisted upon, will now be more apparent. Hints and suggestions for it may be found in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Hazlitt; but in its entirety it is clearly Poe's own. The question remains as to its value. Does it, in the first place, throw light on Poe's original work? Poe's first statement of his poetical creed was contained in the Preface to the Poems of 1831. From this early date until his death he developed his theory — with more and more fullness but with practical consistency — and wrote poetry at the same time. It is thus perfectly natural that his poetic theory and poetic practice should be parallel — in other words that his theory should be base on his poetry an that his poetry in turn should be influenced and determined by his theory. An examination of the poetry, moreover, shows it characterized by brevity, music, unity, and form — the qualities insisted upon on the theory — the later poems gaining on the [page li:] earlier in these respects. The difference between Tamerlane and The Raven is probably in part due to the fact that Poe's theorizing intervened between the two; indeed The Raven is probably the very poem in which the theory is applied most deliberately, if not most successfully — as the Philosophy of Composition would suggest. And there is the same correspondence between Poe's tales and his theory of fiction. In other poet-critics — Dryden for example, or Wordsworth — theory and practice may part company. Poe scrupulously makes the one conform to the other; indeed the effort by which this conformity is secured is sometimes apparent. If this be true, then Poe's criticism is important to the study of his poetry in an unusual degree.
What finally is the absolute or permanent value of Poe's criticism? This question has already been answered by implication. If Poe's theory was based on his own poetry and if in turn his theory moulded and determined his poetic expression, then his poetry and his criticism are inseparable; the merit of the one attaches to the other in its different kind. As his poetry has original value and enlarges our conception of the possibilities of the poetic art — so his criticism adds something which none but Poe could have added to our critical knowledge of poetry.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page ix:]
1 Works, Stedman and Woodberry, vol. vi, p. xiv.
2 History of Literary Criticism, vol. iii, p. 635.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page x:]
1 Hawthorne, p. 62
2 New Essays Toward a Critical Method, p. 111.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xi:]
1 Letters to Dead Authors, p. 134.
2 In the Essay Supplementary to the Preface; which, by the way, Poe read; see 4: 29, 6: 25, notes. This class, Wordsworth says in the context, includes also the most erroneous and perverse critics — but it includes all of the best. Cf. quotations from Poe in 1: 2, note.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xii:]
1 See 149: 12
2 See I: 2, and note. “The vision and the faculty divine,” occurs in Wordsworth's Excursion, Book I. Poe perhaps got it from Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, chap. xviii, where it is quoted.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xiii:]
1 Murders in the Rue Morgue, Works, vol. iv, p. 146.
2 Ibid.
3 Cf. “the philosophy of point,” Works, vol. xvi, p. 130; ‘the philosophy of music, ture’; “The Philosophy of Composition”; “ The Rationale of vol; x; p41; “ The Philosophy of Furni: Verse.” Landor's Cottage is an analysis or formula of the ideal landscape, 7ze Cask of Amontillado of the perfect revenge.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xiii, running to the bottom of page xiv:]
4 Works, vol. xvi, p. 40 (264 21) Cf Coleridge, Table Talk, March 1, 1834: “I am by the law of my nature a reasoner. ... I can take no interest whatever in hearing or saying a thing merely as a fact. ... I require in everything what for lack of ana [page xiv:] other word, I may call propriety, — that is, a reason why the thing is at all, and why it is there and then rather than elsewhere or at another time.”
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xiv:]
1 Cf. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, chap. i: “ That poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science,” etc. And Wordsworth, Letters, vol. ii, p. 313: “The logical faculty has infinitely more to do with poetry,” etc.
2 Works, vol. xiii, p. 129.
3 Works, vol. xvi, p. 150 (301 : 31).
4 Works, vol. x, p. 41.
5 Works, vol. xi, p. 39; vol. xvi, p. 69 (268: 26) cf. vol. xvi, p. 66 (266; 14).
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xv:]
1 Works, vol. xiii, p. 195.
2 Works, vol. xi, p. 1 (65:12).
3 Works, vol. xi, p. 3 (67:19).
4 Works, vol. x, p. 225.
5 Works, vol. xii, p. 241.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xvi:]
1 Works, vol. xii, p. 85.
2 References in the notes from one review to another will substantiate this. See, for example, 234:2, note:
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xvii:]
1 Works, vol, xiii, p. 86; vol. xii, p. 233.
2 Woodberry, Poe (1885), p. 228.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xviii:]
1 Works, vol. xi, pp. 3, 4 (67:1 et seq.).
2 Ibid.
3 Works, vol. ix, p. 185. Cf. vol x, p. 163.
4 Works, vol. xi, p. 63.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xix:]
1 Robertson, New Essays, p. 115, quoting Ingram.
2 Works, Stedman and Woodberry, vol. vi, p. xii. xx
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xx:]
1 Cf. 12:20; 65:24.
2 Works, Stedman and Woodberry, vol. vii, p. 214.
3 12:6; 12:17.
4 See p. ix.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xxi:]
1 The best example of this is probably to be found, not in Poe's criticism, but in his serious propounding of Eureka.; an Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe.
2 Works, vol, xii, p. 131. Cf. 286:17.
3 Works, vol. xii, p. 8.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xxii:]
1 Works, vol. xi, p. 177. This is at least as comprehensible as the “dunce” which Wordsworth applied to Byron.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xxiii:]
1 For these reviews see Works, vols. viii, ix.
2 Works, vol. xiv, p. 236 (195: 29).
3 Woodberry, Poe, pp. 52, 176, 232.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xxiv:]
1 Harrison, Poe, vol. i, p. 20.
2 Ibid., pp. 37, 45, 61.
3 Ibid., p. 86. Perhaps he had been reading Hazlitt's English Poets; see Nation, October 8, 1908, p. 335: If so the fact is even more notable.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xxv:]
1 T. H. Gibson, Harper's Magazine, November, 1867, quoted by Harrison, p. 92. Some allowance may be made; the account was written long after the event.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page xxvi:]
1 John Macy, Atlantic Monthly, December, 1908, p. 836.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xxvi, running to the bottom of page xxvii:]
2 “I sometimes find myself wishing, when dealing with these matters of poetical criticism, that my ignorance were even greater [page xxvii:] than it is. To handle these matters properly, there is needed a poise so perfect that the least overweight in any direction tends to destroy the balance. Temper destroys it, a crotchet destroys it, even erudition may destroy it.” — M. Arnold, On Translating Homer, p. 245.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xxvii:]
1 Works, vol. xii, p. 4; Woodberry, Poe, p. 238.
2 Works, vol. xiv, p. 214. A quotation from Silius Italicus, however, means little; Poe doubtless drew it from some book on Latin prosody.
3 Woodberry, Poe, p. 236, quoting Briggs: ‘He makes quotations from the German, but he can't read a word of the language.” The context shows that Briggs is not entirely to be trusted. See also G. Gruener, Modern Philology, vol. ii, p. 125, “Poe's Knowledge of German”; P. Cobb, The Influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann on the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, chap. iii, “Poe's Knowledge of [page xxviii:] the German Language.’”’ These affirmative arguments are not entirely convincing. In the absence of proof it may be guessed that Poe had a smattering of German but derived his considerable knowledge of German literature mainly from translations and descriptions.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xxviii:]
1 Pinakidia and similar articles throw light on Poe's reading and literary habits. These show pretense rather than solidity of learning; — or, better perhaps, they show the pathetic attempt of a man not broadly educated to make himself at home in universal literature. Too much has been made of their recklessness of citation, etc. (such as the reference to the Mélanges Littéraires of “Suard and André”) — which shows not so much dishonesty as ignorance and carelessness. Poe was after all not a scholar, but a journalist living on the literary “frontier.” These articles show also Poe's interest in the curious and outré in literature, corresponding to his fondness for out-of-the-way matters in geography and science — an interest which perhaps served to give breadth and imagination to his criticism.
2 Briggs, quoted in Woodberry, Poe, p. 238; Chivers, in Century January, 1903, p. 447.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xxix:]
1 Works, vol. ix, p.95. This review (of an English anthology) is worth reading.
2 Works, vol. ix, p. 273 (36:29); vol. xi, p. 76 (81:4)
3 See Letter to B —— and notes in this volume.
4 Works, vol. viii, p. 284 (18:4).
5 Works, vol. xii, p. 32.
6 Works, vol. xi, p. 76 (81:21); Century, January, 1903, p. 447.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xxx:]
1 Works, vol. xii, p. 34. Cf. also: “I am profoundly excited by music, and by some poems — those of Tennyson especially — whom, with Keats, Shelley, Coleridge (occasionally), and a few others of like thought and expression, I regard as the sole poets.” — Letter to Lowell, in Woodberry, Poe, p. 213.
2 See 3:31, note.
3 See 16: note 2; 78: 28; and notes.
4 See 8:23, note.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xxxi:]
1 Woodberry, Poe, p. 96. An idea of these gleanings may be got by comparing Works, vol. xiv, pp. 39, 41, with Schlegel, Bohn edition, pp. 233, 278, etc.
2 Bohn edition, pp. 17, 18.
3 Bohn edition, pp, 26, 243. Works, vol. viii, p. “126; vol. xi, p. 79 (84:2).
4 285:20.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xxxii:]
1 See Letter to B —— and notes as evidence.
2 See Review (June, 1836) in Works, vol. ix, p. 51.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xxxiii:]
1 See 16: note 2, and note thereon.
2 Biographia, chap. xiv.
3 Ibid., chap. xv.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xxxiv:]
1 Works, vol, xi, p. 226.
2 Works, vol. ix, p. 145. For the passage see Hazlitt, Works, Waller and Glover, vol. ix, p. 429.
3 See 179: 4, and note.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xxxv:]
1 Poe, p. 93.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xxxvi:]
1 Works, vol. xi, p. 76 (81:7).
2 Works, vol. xiii, p. 73 (148:15).
3 See 234: 2, and note.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xxxvii:]
1 Works, vol. xiv, p. 299 (255:4).
2 Works, vol xi p. 255; cf vol xiv, p. 198 (155:17).
3 Poe always gives Coleridge as authority for this statement, — which is difficult to find in Coleridge's writings. See 238: 20, note.
4 Works, vol. xi, p..277; vol: xvi, p. 56 (265:16).
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xxxviii:]
1 Works, vol. xi, p. 255. Cf. vol. viii, p. 283 (16: 4).
2 Works, vol. xi, p. 23. Cf. 81: 9, and note.
3 Works, vol. xiv, p273 (236:4) Cf. vol. xvi, p. 102 (279:23): “Mere description is not poetry at all. We demand creation — [[Greek Text]].” See also 236: 4, note.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xxxix:]
1 Works, vol. xi, p. 76 (81:21)
2 Works, vol. xiv, p. 275 (238:15); vol. xii, p. 38 (104:17).
3 Works, vol. viii, p. 282 (15: 21); vol. x, p. 65 (58: 11).
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xl:]
1 Works, vol. x, p. 65 (58: 11).
2 Works, vol. viii, p 283 (16: 4).
3 Works, vol. xi, p. 74 (78:26).
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xli:]
1 Works, vol. viii, p. 284: (172:12).
2 Works, vol. xiii, p. 129.
3 Works, vol. xvi, p. 99 (279:3).
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xlii:]
1 Works, vol xi, pp. 73, 110 (78:8; 97:16).
2 Works, vol. xii, p. 37 (102:17).
3 Poe may have got the word and a hint for the idea from Coleridge: “A poem contains the same elements as a prose composition; the difference, therefore, must consist in a different combination, in consequence of a different object proposed. According to the difference of the object will be the difference of the combination.” — Biographia Literaria, chap. xiv.
4 Works, vol. xiv, p. 73; cf. vol. xiv, p. 203 (161:1).
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xliii:]
1 Works, vol. xi, p. 96.
2 Works, vol. xi, p. 73 (77: 30)
3 Works, vol. xili, p. 33 (107: 14).
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xliv:]
1 Works, vol xiii, p. 37 (111:10).
2 Works, vol. xvi, p. 97.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xlv:]
1 Works, vol. xiii, p. 146.
2 Works, vol. viii, pi 126; vol. xi, p. 106 (93:14) vol. xiv, pp. 196, 267 (153: 26, 229: 6); vol. xvii, p. 266 (321: 27).
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xlvi:]
1 Works, vol. xi, p. 109 (95: 31).
2 Works, vol, xiii, p. 85.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xlvii:]
1 Works, vol. xi, p. 110 (97: 16). This judgment is curiously reversed in the later critique of Hawthorne, where he is said to be only “peculiar.”
2 Works, vol. ix, p. 261.
3 Works, vol. x, p. 153.
4 Works, vol. xiv, p, 188 (320: 14).
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xlviii:]
1 Works, vol. xiv, p. 188 (320: 14).
2 Works, vol. x, p. 121; cf, vol. xiii, p. 47 (121: 1) for a better but longer statement.
3 Works, vol. x, pp. 200, 218; vol. xii, p. 224.
4 Works, vol. xi, p. 108 (94: 25)
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xlix:]
1 Works, vol. xi, p. 108 (94:31). Cf. vol. xili, p. 153, for the same paragraph with interesting variations.
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - FCP09, 1909] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - A Poe Bookshelf - Introduction (F. C. Prescott, 1909)